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Wednesday, 12 November 2014

Sampling :

Sampling is an important stage in social research that makes the research functional and increases its validity. Society is a grand group of people. When we want to do research about a social problem, it seems an impossible work but sampling makes it easy and does not affect the standard of research. This characteristic of sampling gives a strong technique and it is playing an important part in other fields of science in addition to sociology among these fields are accounting, astronomy, chemistry, manufacturing and biology etc. In sciences, sampling is used basically for survey and content analysis research.

Why Sampling?
It is such a facility that makes a research easy and providing a function-able field. Especially in sociology, sampling provides the following benefits :i. In social sciences especially the population of research is big enough to reach all cases under research. Therefore, sampling as representative makes the problem accessible.ii. Economically; it is difficult to spend too much on research. Through sampling, research is made economically.iii. A lot of time is required to hold research on full population and this may make the research meaningless. Sampling plays an important part in this respect by selecting a representative sample to save time and to gain results in less time easily.iv. Research demands trained people which are always required .To solve this problem, sampling plays a role making the less trained people to complete the research work.v. Social research is a process of testing the mutual relation of variables in a material environment and in an open environment, there are more chances of other variables to influence the research. The more the population of a research, the more the other variables effect difficult to control. Thus research results can be affected seriously. Sampling provides to control this by limiting the objects and making the. results to be got in a better way.

What is Population?
The term population usually refers to the total group or universe, the researcher wishes to study. For example, all married couples in Pakistan will be the population of the social research, which is being is... for tile study of marital satisfaction. All members related to a social research topic maize the population. Sometimes the word universe is also used for population.

Other Concepts

i. Sampling Unit :
It is such an element that when joined with other elements, makes population being studied. This unit may be a group, family, institution, books, etc. a unit of analysis in a research.ii. Sampling Frame :
A list of units of sampling is called a sampling frame and sample is taken from this list.iii. Target Population :
A researcher starts the research keeping in View the population but specify few people of special characteristics from the population which is called his target population of his study. For example from the whole population of a city marital couples only.iv. Sampling Ratio :
The proportion between size of sample and target population is called sampling ratio. For example, a population of 150,000 and out of this 150 individual are required as sample by a researcher, the sampling ratio will be 0.3% (l 50/ 1 50,000).v. Logic of Sampling :
Good and Hatt has prescribed two conditions for this :
i. It should be representative ; ii. It should be enough.

i. Representative :
It is necessary that the sampling taken from a universe should have characteristics according to the study. It should be powerful and workable to have exactness according to universe.ii. Enough :
its size should be as big as to fulfil the object of research. It should neither too much to make research unbelievable and, nor too big to become a source of wastage of time and money. It depends on the nature
importance and will of the researcher.